The Five Tribes, the Iroquois, credit Hiawatha as the originator of the Great Law of Peace. Thus Hiawatha is the inventor of American democracy: when? around the Thirteenth Century.

Of course a different legend is taught in the schools: American democracy originated with Franklin, Jefferson, in the Eighteenth Century, in imitation of the ancient Greeks.

pk, yours truly, inspired by Ivan Illich, offered public networking, digital data basing, a politically free internet, in 1970. Of course that’s not the way white kleptocrat news organs, history departments, patent offices tell it: there the internet developed in the Pentagon, at CERN … They further developed at MIT, SRI … Much of this happened in the 1980s, a decade plus after Illich’s book and pk’s offer to do it.

So: Hiawatha is dead, has been for more than a half a dozen hundred years. Is he in heaven?
Well, according to the most familiar forms of Christianity, he can’t be: he wasn’t baptized! Jesus can’t love him, the Church won’t allow Jesus to love him. So, Hiawatha isn’t in the Christian heaven.

But what about pk’s heaven?
In pk’s heaven true records are kept. Lies are told on earth, the truth is traced in heaven. On earth royalties go to the guy with the patent; in heaven royalties are due to the actual inventor: it doesn’t matter who registered the invention with some bureaucracy of the kleptocrats.
(On earth, Columbus thought he was in India; in heaven, he was no where near India.)

So: in pk’s heaven, Hiawatha is due any royalties for democracy in America: it doesn’t matter what percentage of Hiawatha is legend and what fact: if there’s any fact, then that fact can’t be gotten ’round, no matter how many kleptocrats vote to bury it.

In Korzybskian semantics, there’s the territory: what actually is; and there’s the map: what we say is. There’s the universe, what it is, and there’s human ideas, utterances, descriptions … Where there’s much of a discrepancy we have a species hailing itself as intelligent failing to be intelligent.

I’m reading a silly but cute novel in which the author pretends that the Greek gods are alive and living in the US. Some kid thinks he’s an ordinary New Yorker, actually he’s a son of Poseidon. The kid is taken to a camp for other mixed breeds, part god, part human. They all practice burnt offerings: they get some lunch, they scrape a choice portion into the fire: the gods get the aroma, maybe some of the nutrition.

In heaven, Ivan Illich, who proposed social networking through cybernetic data bases in 1970, is due some royalties from public cybernetic data bases. He thought of it, he published the idea. Oh not for cybernetic data bases for corporations, banks, for government, for the military; they had all that before Illich (or pk). No, no: public data basing: people: you and me.
In heaven, I, pk, who actually offered to do the social networking through cybernetic data bases in 1970, am owed a royalty from Amazon, from eBay, from Google, from Yahoo, from FaceBook … e-books …
But on earth, where we live our extensional lives (where we occupy space, have weight), I get arrested, censored, sabotaged … This is after I’d already been silenced, shunned … been rendered a pariah: all for following the greatest follower of Christ!

The Church had defrocked Illich before I ever heard of him! That’s was one way in which I recognized him to be Christianity’s preeminent saint! [2016 02 12 AnarChrin offers an improved vocabulary.]

God has all the records of my Christian internet of 1970 ff. At Judgment it won’t matter what the Library of Congress, the NY Times, TIMELife say.
Meantime I don’t have a pot to piss in.

But God gives me little token rewards, anticipations of heaven: the crumbs from any of which are more valuable than the wealth of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ted Turner combined.
They didn’t support me or Illich in 1970: what does that make them?

But part of my greatest wealth, my heavenly credit, comes from seeing what has to happen at Judgment when we switch from earth-sight to Heaven-Sight.

Except for one thing: I always used to believe that once the scales were removed from our eyes humans would see the truth. Now I don’t believe that we’re capable, as a species, of seeing the truth: even if it’s God showing us!
We didn’t understand Jesus! … why would we understand God!?
Einstein should endeavor to express Relativity as well as he can, Darwin express Natural Selection. Einstein, Darwin … God … should not waste time worrying how much the cockroaches understand. Fuck ’em; just get the power out of their hands!

There are differences between the internet Illich described and the internet pk offered, very few, but significant. There are voluminous differences between pk’s internet and the one the government forced us to pay for and have. Here let me note a few key differences:
1) Above all: the Illich / pk internet was non-compulsory!
2) Also: the information was unsupervised: you can say what you like, you can lie. A critic of what you write could write a different essay, pointing out errors in yours, but the teacher cannot correct your paper under your signature!
3) Feedback
One of the key features of Illich’s internet, wholly passed on by me and my FLEX, concerned feedback. In this world a consumer can read consumer reports written by experts; at FLEX a consumer could write his own reports, read the feedback of others! of all others!
Pilate could condemn Jesus, in words! Jesus could condemn Pilat, in words. No one could actually nail anyone to a cross!

In effect, you could advertise yourself as a brain surgeon. The government could write an evaluation saying you weren’t, but FLEX issued no license, there was nothing to revoke. No: quality control was up to a digestion of feedback: a Hatfield could comment on the qualifications of a McCoy, a McCoy and a Hatfield could comment on the qualifications of an Obama.

Civilization forces a head onto the body politic. The public could have used FLEX to declaw the imposed head, and to rule itself with an emergent head, emergent from uncensored data.

People said I was naive: and I admit, had the publis begun to support FLEX, the government could have stepped in, claimed FLEX by eminent domain, and turned it over to the corporations and their school board. Essentially, that is what the government did: but only decades after the public failed to nourish its weaponry for freedom.

The Great Law, Illich, pk … lots of things can be Searched at this blog, and elsewhere on line, but, except for FLEX, I don’t add links yet: try reading the text first.